Saturday, 28 September 2013

When I was in the advertising business, travelling around the world a
lot, I used to get irritated by the fact that everyone on aeroplanes seems to
have opinions on the morality and otherwise of the business, mostly very
similar. (Are people still so allergic to adverts arriving through their mail
boxes?)

So in an endeavour to stem the flow, when asked on flights “What
do you do?”, I tried to come up with an answer that would put a dead stop to
the conversation.

For a while I was in marine insurance. This did quite well.
Then, mid-way between Brisbane and Sydney one day, I was asked the usual
question by a bloke and came up with the winning formula. I was in dredging.

Wednesday, 25 September 2013

I was lead facilitator of a big Unilever workshop in Manila - and the going got tough.

Participating were 50 managers from all over South East Asia, the fastest growing region in the company at the time, and so filled with self-confidence.

The problem was that the Thais and the Indonesians were totally at loggerheads with each other about the way forward. I did what I could to bring about some kind of consensus. No joy.

Eventually my very experienced American colleague, Ned Preble, stepped forward. "Shall I see what I can do?" he asked me. "Be my guest, Ned!" I responded gratefully.

"OK, would everyone who intends to find a solution to this problem step up please," he announced. "You should know, however, that if you choose not to participate, you're agreeing to the solution. Agreed?"

So over the next 30 minutes or so, Ned facilitated a heated, chaotic-seeming scrum of competing voices around a flip-chart. Eventually, the hubbub subsided.

Sunday, 22 September 2013

While there have
been some very positive notices about the Australia exhibition at the RA in the British
press (notably in the Daily Telegraph and FT Weekend), many have struck the
usual note of patronising dismissal.

For example, Adrian “I am certainly no
expert on Australian art” Searle in The Guardian tells us that it’s: “… a
wobbly ride through the past and into the present”, the Aboriginal paintings
“extremely difficult to read”, the silverware “ghastly”, the flowering of the
late nineteenth century dismissed as the work of “Barbizon-school émigrés, mediocre European
impressionists and would-be symbolists”. And from then on, according to Searle,
it gets “much more problematic”.

When I went to live and work in Sydney in the 1980s, I knew
all about the Aussie dislike of “whinging poms”.

But, after a while, it became clear to me that whinging isn’t
the only, or even the major, source of complaint. That is the sense that
Australians have of being patronised by us. Sometimes this springs from the
particular style of English humour, but so often it is just naked
condescension.

It had never occurred to me that this lay at the heart of
Australian-English relations for generations. That is, until I picked up a
book, Recollections, by the English-born writer David Christie Murray, published
in 1908. Murray had lived in Melbourne in the 1890s.

“I have never in my life known anything more offensively
insolent than the patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling
Cockney extend to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him,” wrote
Murray. “I have seen an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own
table, and set everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists
are necessarily inferior to the home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of
thing.”

Thursday, 19 September 2013

To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What
a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit
to its curators ‒ Ron
Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and
Kathleen Soriano of the RAin London.

The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took
place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒
over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine
paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art
establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have
predicted,” according to The Times.

That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The
critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial
showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by
Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more
correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English
trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical
diagrams.”

By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition
(at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the
most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square
canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*

The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with
major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time.
Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of
1886.

*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the
collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

I have a couple of dozen tomes by Nikolaus Pevsner, each one
detailing every building of note in the counties of England, but the book that has been at the heart of my ecclesiastical tourism around England has
always been John Betjeman’s Pocket Guide to English Parish Churches. Published
in 1958 it covers some 2,000 examples.

In that I’ve recorded every visit I’ve made to an Anglican
church since the mid-1960s, so I’ll be coming up to half a century quite soon.
The most visited counties over that time are Kent (97 churches) and Oxfordshire
(52). I used to live near the former, and am now adjacent to the latter.

So it’s a pleasure to be able to recommend a new book,
Oxfordshire’s Best Churches by Richard Wheeler. It is well-researched and
beautifully written, dealing in detail with the architecture, sculpture and
stained glass of fifty buildings covering a thousand years of creativity and
change. Shamefully, I’ve only been inside eleven of them. And there are shorter
entries on a further sixty-five, together with superb photography (taken by the
author) and nice typography throughout.

Altogether a joy to have. Enthused by it, we visited one of
the most charming and atmospheric in the county, North Stoke.

Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Over the years I have had the pleasure of partnering with
(and learning from) some wonderful facilitators. And, amongst them all, a few
particular moments remain in the memory.

One such was in Amsterdam. I was working with my colleague
Emma Luten, helping one of the top ad agencies there, JWT, to create a new
vision and strategy.

From quite early on, it was clear that the local management
team was unhappy. Overwhelmingly Dutch, they clearly did not like each other,
scoring points off one other at will, and resentful of working in the meeting in the
international language, English.

So, after about twenty minutes, one of them told Emma to put
away the marker pen, to sit down and be quiet.

“We need to talk to each other,” he said. “In Dutch.”

They went at it, hammer and tongs, many speaking at once,
voices raised in anger and frustration, nobody listening to anyone else. Emma
and I sat silently.

After half an hour or so, they paused to draw breath. Emma
said: “Do you mind if I say something?”

“What?”

“Well, it seems to me that there are three main issues
here.”

“And they would be...?”

Emma calmly laid them out before them. The team was stunned
and reluctantly agreed.

“My suggestion would be that we use these issues as task
headlines and work together on each of them in the remainder of this meeting,”
said Emma.

Sunday, 8 September 2013

I seem to be in another Shakespeare immersion phase again –
the fourth time in my life, I think. This time around I’m especially interested
in the plays that I’ve failed to connect with well previously ‒King John was something
of a revelation last year.

Now it’s the turn of All’s Well That Ends Well, a wonderful
production in the main house at Stratford. This is truly how I experience
Shakespeare best: an uncluttered stage; real belief in the plot, the characters
and the words; a modern staging, but without supermarket trolleys (Nancy
Meckler the director); and great acting from a cast which was also a completely
interdependent ensemble.

Thursday, 5 September 2013

The announcement of Steve Ballmer’s retirement as CEO of
Microsoft has been accompanied by the recital of a sad list of major
innovations created by that company, but rejected by the management during his
term of office and exploited successfully by competitors – notably by Apple.

The list includes the iPhone and the iPad. And they are
probably just the tip of the iceberg. What’s more, the company did launch a stream
of new products that failed.

Poor Ballmer [?] is by no means alone. He’s just more famous
than the other CEOs who routinely block breakthrough ideas.

The central problem in innovation isn’t coming up with ideas,
nor with implementing them. It’s with recognising and supporting them. After
all, the more disruptive the idea, the less likely it is that consumer research
will pick it out as a winner, and the more likely it is that it will contravene
an existing mindset.

Distressingly there’s no evidence that senior managers are
any better at picking breakthrough winners than my mum.

Monday, 2 September 2013

I had looked forward to seeing Steve Ballmer, the CEO of
Microsoft (who has recently announced that he is stepping down). He was guest
speaker at a major Coca-Cola conference in the mid-90s that I was
co-facilitating with Bill Boggs. At the time Microsoft was the hottest company
on the planet.

In the event… I just thought he was preachy, screechy and
dull.

I’m not really surprised that the company has performed so
poorly over the past two decades. So poorly that Microsoft’s stock surged when
he said he was off.

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Welcome

When I started this blog, the posts were mainly about innovation, creativity and leadership matters. So if you want the see those, they are mostly in the earlier years. More recently I've been writing about the arts - music, literature and art itself. I still post from time to time on innovation matters and indeed anything else that intrigues me.

About Me

Roger Neill FRSA, FIoD, is Managing Partner of the innovation consultancy, Per Diem. He was Founding Director of the Centre for Creativity, City University London, and international managing partner for Synectics Corporation, a world leader in innovation and creativity. He writes, speaks and conducts masterclasses and workshops around the world.
Previously Roger worked in marketing communications. For ten years he was with Saatchi & Saatchi and was appointed to the board of directors aged 27. With Lintas (now Lowe) he became chairman in Australia/New Zealand and regional director for Asia/Pacific. He was deputy chairman of WCRS Worldwide in London. Roger was World President of the International Advertising Association 1990-1992.
An expert on the innovators, artists, writers and musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he helped Sam Wanamaker to re-build Shakespeare's Globe in London. He curated the exhibition Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett for the National Portrait Gallery in Australia. Roger was founder of Sinfonia 21 and chairman of Endymion Ensemble. He started his working life as a professional rock musician.